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This masterly suggestion seemed to Rainham both plausible and practical, and he proceeded to unfold the whole story of his first meeting with Kitty. When he reached the part of his narrative which brought out the girl's explanation that she was seeking to speak with a Mr. Crichton, Lightmark looked at him again covertly, with the same threatening light in his glance.
"Oh for an epithet to describe her!" said Lightmark, catching his friend's enthusiasm. "She isn't exactly pretty yes, she is pretty, but she isn't beautiful! She's got any amount of what dramatic critics call chic. Don't shudder I hate the word quite as much as you do, but it was inevitable. The only thing I feel sure about is that she's espiègle, and altogether delightful.
Lightmark, writing in an hour of intimate excitement, when the burden of his friend's sacrifice seemed for a fleeting moment more intolerable than the wrench of explanation with his wife, had too effectually compromised himself. He had cringed, procrastinated, promised; had been abject, hypocritical, explicit.
Lightmark," he added sternly, "there has been a mistake you see that for which I apologize. Wake up, for God's sake! Come and see after your wife; some slander has upset her. This woman is mine; I will take her away." The girl trembled violently; she appeared fascinated, terrified into a passive obedience by Rainham's imperious eyes, which burnt in his white face like the eyes of a dying man.
It caused him to remind himself, a trifle sadly, how little, after all, one knew of even one's nearest friend and Lightmark, perhaps, occupied to him that relation how much of the country of his mind remains perpetually undiscovered; and it made him wonder, as he had sometimes wondered before, whether the very open and sunny nature of the young painter, which was so large a part of his charm, had not its concealed shadows how far, briefly, Lightmark's very frankness might not be a refinement of secretiveness?
As soon as Lightmark and Rainham were left alone in the twilight of the studio, the former flung himself into a chair with a sigh of relief, and devoted himself to rolling and lighting a cigarette.
There was nothing but pleasure in the slight manifestation of surprise which preceded his frank greeting of Lightmark, a greeting thoroughly English in its matter-of-fact want of demonstrativeness, and the avoidance of anything likely to attract the attention of others.
That has come to an end; I have sold it." Lightmark whistled softly. "Well, you surprise me! Of course I am glad; we will be glad too. We shall see more of you now, I suppose? or will you live abroad?" "Abroad?" echoed Rainham absently. "Oh, yes, very probably. But tell me, how is Eve?" "As we seem to be arriving, I think I will let her tell you herself."
"It's an accident that he happens to be connected with shipping a fortunate one, though, for he owns a most picturesque old shanty in the far East. But actually he does not know a rudder post from a jib-boom." "I suppose you have been painting it?" said Oswyn shortly. Lightmark nodded. "I have been painting the river from his wharf.
The fact that in those days Rainham avoided Lightmark's name, once so often quoted; his demeanour, when the more ignorant or less tactical of their mutual acquaintances pressed him with inquiries as to the well-being and work of his former friend, had not failed to suggest to the intimate circle that there had been a rupture, a change, something far more significant than the general severance which had gradually been effected between them, the unreclaimed children of the desert, and Richard Lightmark, the brilliant society painter; something as to which it seemed that explanation would not be forthcoming, as to which questions were undesirable.
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